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host: author sam quinones, what do portsmouth, ohio, los angeles, boston, and columbus, ohio all have in common? sam: >> guest: great question. good to be with you, peter. they all have in common that they are kind of part of the large tapestry of the addiction epidemic that is now coast-to-coast. i would have said a few years ago the opioid addiction epidemic, , but i do believe tht that is changed in the last few years with the addition of methamphetamine to the mix, and both of these drugs now, fentanyl has taken a place in the old school, not that long ago of opioid painkillers and

heroin, what connects all those others i should says well, is that both of these drugs are now coast-to-coast. and this is the first time you've ever seen that in the history of our country in this drug use. you have never seen one source cover the entire united states with one drug, let alone two, and the source is the mexican drug trafficking principally on the western coast of mexico, mostly pacific northwest, the northwest of mexico. they have such enormous reduction capacity for both these synthetic drugs that they have covered the country. so vermont as meth, so it is used in, l.a. has didn't used

to.e all of the cities in between towns, rural areas, et cetera are covered in the stuff now, and this is what makes, what type a lot of these towns together, that we are all part of the same story. it used to be drug use was very regional. heas used to have one story here and 500 miles away the story would be very different. well, that's no longer the case. it's cover the entire country in methamphetamine and fentanyl, largely because these drugs are both synthetic. you can make them from chemicals. no plants involved. them undereed to go the sun. no farmers are needed to harvest them, all that sort of thing. the production capacity down in mexico has outstripped anything we've ever seen before ever and that is allow them to cover the country in these two drugs, and that's one of the main reasons, one of the main things that connects the towns that you mention and many t others.

>> host: project chosen any five cities in america given what you just said? >> guest: pretty much, sure. there are some towns were of notice methamphetamine really has made inroads. baltimore is one that he understand, new jersey, not so much but parts of new york. by and large you can find the same stories with varying degrees of intensity all across rural parts of the country, indiana, ohio, west virginia, oregon, albuquerque, , l.a. skidrow, on and on. that is one of the things that's absolutely knew about what we are seeing, and that is there are two drugs and they are everywhere. of course they are extraordinarily potent peer fentanyl is most deadly drug with everything on our streets in the united states, and methamphetamine drives people to

symptoms of schizophrenia. i think, i think, can't think think of some areas i probably couldn't. i think every part of the country has these issues. >> host: let's go to fentanyl for a minute. that was developed in the lab in the united states ined the 1950, correct? >> guest: no, it was developed in belgium in 1959 by one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, paul janssen. he owned until his death janssen pharmaceutical in belgium and it was kind of a compound in a small town. there's belgium, the man was one of the most fertile minds when a cames to developing drugs. he developede many drugs that were of enormous benefit to humankind. fentanyl is one ofnd them.

surgery.revolutionized it made it so you could do all kinds of surgeries that were not possible because it allowed you to bring people into anesthesia and out of it very quickly. that was a revelation, and i fed fentanyl. i had a heart attack five years ago, they gave me fentanyl. it's a standard drug that is been applied in surgery tends millions of times all across the country. it was initially controlled only for the use of anesthesiologists in surgical settings, because they knew its potency which one of the keys to its success in the surgical environment, made it extraordinarily dangerous and hands the of people who didw what they were doing. that is effectively what is happened since 2013, but

certainly 14, 15, 16 usc usc explosion of fentanyl in the underworld. and, of course, in theio underworld people don't have a a clue what they're doing and becomes extraordinarily deadly, as do the analogues, the chemical cousins of fentanyl, acetyl fentanyl, all these different little tweaks, molecular tweaks you can make to this molecule that will turn it into a slightly different drug come sometimes much more potent even then fentanyl.an paul janssen predicted these drugs as well. he wrote about them in a chapter in a book that i i read, didnt understand fairly well, about the helpan of chemists. but he saw the enormous potency of these drugs was something to be aware of, and to care for. and and i would say that in tt ten years the underworld has simply discovered fentanyl and

it's an enormous potency, enormous profitability, and the sense, , too, that you no longer need, if youd are heroin trafficker you no longer need to grow poppies, which according to whatever season they have. you can make this stuff all year round. all you need now are the chemicals to be able to make this the stuff. but s s fentanyl itself is a revolutionary drug and did wonderful things for surgery and patience like me since the '60s. >> host: in your most recent book "the least of us," you write that drug overdose fatalities each year surpassed the toll of american deaths during the vietnam war. have grown a a little bit immune tohi this? >> guest: you know, maybe, yeah, i guess. it's hard to say. i know families have been affected by it are not.

they feel itn viscerally every day. it lingers. it doesn't go away, the thef a loved one due to this. but i would say yeah, there's this feeling like, well, these are drug users, so who cares? there's a feeling like well, this is just one more year of another statistic, we've become a newer to the ever rising statistics, ever rising death tolls. a i'm afraid that may be blunting a little bit our response to this problem. it feels to me sometimes like, like on the other hand, there are more and more and more families every year affected by this problem. more . more communities, more businesses, more churches, more groups of any kind of, social groupings of any every kind. so seems to me to be expanding.

i used to think what i wrote my topic,ook on this "dreamland," that everybody was about four ornd five degrees removed from an overdose death. and anecdotally speaking of till it feels more like two, like you know somebody who knows somebody who has a relative who died. an absolute feels to me like it's expanded all over the country and, therefore, cannot be ignored anymore. that is actually happening all across the country. i don't think this can be ignored. we may not have the same urgency of response that i think we need to have but don't think it can be ignored anymore. >> host: according to the national institute on drug abuse, if you look at this chart, where showing a chart on the air right now, mr. quinones, you can see the rapid rise in fentanyl overdose deaths. it takes up almost in a direct line straight up. >> guest: and that begins,

exactly, that begins once the underworld figures out fentanyl, and that happens beginning in about 2013, 14, 15. china by then has been, is beginning, chinese chemical companies i should say, are advertising on the web and on the dark web fentanyl is a lot of dealers in the united states by the stuff, get it sent to them through the mail. visit of the initial invasion fentanyl began to happen in those years i mentioned. and he comesn to people who view fentanyl is like the lottery ticket. they have all of a sudden won the lottery. the profits from the stuff are going to be through the roof, right? the problem is fentanyl is the first drug, the profits of which are then tied to you being able to mix it, because fentanyl is so potent. the equivalent of a few grams of

salt of fentanyl will make you high. a couple more will kill you. you can't sell a few grains of salt on the street. it's just not logistically commercially possible as as a street dealer. and so what you need to do is mix it with a lot of inert chemicals, powders that don't do anything, and the problem is that nobody on the street knows how to mix this stuff. they have proven themselves to be, on the contrary, absolutely miserable at mixing fentanyl. one of the chapters in "the least of us" talks about the occurrence, how often narcotics officers would rate these mix sites. some guy would have a mixed site in his basement, whatever. i guy in his underwear or whatever, the kind of thing, and they would find this guy, all over they were finding this, the people were mixing their

fentanyl in magic bullet blenders. now, your audience will no magic bullet blenders select target, from infomercials. they are great. we own a magic bullet blender in her house, okay? it's a magnificent instrument when you want to make salsas and smoothies and all that stuff. it is uniformly awful when you try to mixtr a powder. it's for mixing liquid. when you try to mix a powder it is a very bad job, and fentanyl -- but folks are mixing fentanyl in magic bullet blenders and coming up with mixes that were horribly uneven and, therefore, some parts of what the next had nothing in it and the other parts had enough fentanyl to kill three people. so you begin to see these clusters of overdoses, if remember back in 2014, 15 you begin to see in cincinnati, huntington, west virginia,, akron, places like that, the areas that were first hit by the opioid epidemic with the dealers were. due to what could be next on the

opioid kind of horizon. they began to mix the fentanyl that they're getting mail to them through the u.s. mail from chinese chemical companies, the begin to mix this stuff with magic bullet blenders and that's what you begin to see this really awful mixes and you begin to see these clusters, 50 in a weekend, 75 overdoses in a weekend. that begins to change once the mexican kind of taken over in about 2016, 17. not entirely change but you get away from most egregious effect, of all this.ut but fentanyl, so fentanyl has now been discovered by the mexican underworld and they are producing it in catastrophic quantities and they are smuggling it through the border with, the border where they share with a country that's a free-trade agreement with mexico.

so you're getting enormous quantities of these drugs just come through, mostly in trucks through border crossings. and hence the quantities are just geometrically larger than the ever work when the chinese chemical companies were sending a found at a time through the mail. >> host: sam quinones, your first two books, "true tales from another mexico" and antonius gun and alfie no, sir dream dull little more with the quirkiness of some mexican cultures and then kind of morphed into migration and immigration as well. are your last two books "dreamland" and "the least of us" natural outflows from the first two books? >> guest: oh, sure. oh, sure, yeah, yeah. the way i got onto "dreamland" in the first place was because i was really wanting to write

about this one town in mexico. we want to write about mexican heroin traffickers and had significant background, i lived in mexico for ten years. i wrote a whole lot about mexican immigration, visit many, many villages, various places where people migrated, so the migration story to me was a very familiar one. it's because of that that i have been on the story about this one village, a small town in the small state ten years in mexico never been there. just encounter much because of so small. the smallll little town which ws on the pacific coast of mexico just south of the state of sinaloa, the drug central mexico where these guys have developed a method for selling black tar

heroin like very similar to pizza delivery, a delivery system for black tar heroin. so you would set up this system in a town and you would have an operator steny byy taking order, taking telephone orders, i think he would have several drivers driving around the town, their mouths full of little balloons a tenth of a graham doses of black tar heroin waiting for the call go meet the person at the brooking -- burger king parking lot at the street corner and he wants five. to get there, meet the guy, spit out five, five doses, he would pay you and that was their system. this system spread throughout, and i i just thought at first tt this was a fastening system. i've never seens this before. definite use no guns figure very much about trying to be

nonviolent and not worry about, you do, not try to be about shootouts and so on. and then from there though i went down to this village, this village was very much like every other village that i been to where people have migrated to the united states, but along the way i begin to understand the reason these guys have this enormous new market for selling their heroin and and i couls expanding. effective cross the mississippi river, now in the midwest where the never been before, was because of this other story that was much bigger, huge story that i did not understand at all, about, which was about revolution and pain management and expansion of use opioid painkillers and all kinds of ways, all kinds of pain with

numerous, numerous refills if you wanted. very great, , aggressive liberalization of use of opioids which i didn't understandbe at l at the time when i started this. i didn't really know what an oxycontin was aura vicodin order percocet. i was in mexico when allvi this was going on. i was oblivious to it entirely. so when i came back i was focused so much on the heroin guys that for a long time i didn't realizee behind them the reason they had a big market for going market expanding market all across the country was because we had exploited the amounts of opioid painkillers had just exploded and those painkillers contained drugs that are chemical cousins, very, very similar to heroin, people are getting addicted to them and then switching to heroin which is why the guy that i was writing about had this burgeoning new market. it was a revelation to me and that met i had a huge learning

curve. for me the learning curve was not the village in mexico. i had that down. i knew that story very well. to me the big issue, the big thing i had to cover was pain management, all the things connected to pain management and then of course addiction and that kind of thing. that to me was the big story. i could not have started on this track that's now been going on since 2009 for me, 13 years, without my background in mexico. in fact, i don't understand writes aboutybody drugs, , drug trafficking, drug use, drug treatment honestly in america without understanding mexico, because almost everything that is abuse in this country comes from or through mexico. >> host: and sam quinones has covered migration, immigration, and the drug epidemic for many years. he was quoted in the the "ls

angeles times" in 2017te as saying, i have followed the debaten illegal immigration for more than 20 years, during which time i worked as a journalist in mexico in the u.s. the issue is dominated, comfortably, by americans desire to have it all. we want cheap stuff and low prices. we also wantp to luxuriate in complaints about strangers in our midst who don't assimilate assessed as we imagined our grandparents did. >> guest: yeah, i think that's very still much the case. i've often felt that in many areas the presence of illegal mexican immigrants is tolerated, even sometimes applauded because americans, on one hand, we like the stuff that they provide us, right? they work very, very hard and

they become very, very creative and innovative. there are of course many, many costs that come along with that. there is not free lunch. there's trade-offs in every part of life inal this is a differen, so you do have people who suffer because of that and have suffered and particularly folks at the lower end of the economic spectrum of the united states economy. it struck me when i was living in mexico that we had a fairly kind of, i don't how to put it, maybe childish attitude. we wanted everything and wanted to be able to complain about everything, too. we wanted everything, so we want cheap labor, we want houses painted. in l.a. it's pretty much if you want anything done to rouse, it's pretty much going to be up latino immigrant that doesn't. we want all of that and we wanted want

cheap and their extraordinary talented guys. there has been an education for all those guys, most of them amanda of course. and that at the same time we want to complain. it's almost like kind of a malaise of america i think sometimes people just want everything is in complaint about it, too, you know. >> host: thanks for joining us for both evs monthly "in depth" program with one author and his or her body of work this month we're talking with author and journalist sam quinones about some ofit the issues that you were discussed here, the drug epidemic illegal immigration migration, et cetera. your participation is a big part of this program. here you can participate. the area code is -- you can also

send text message if that's easy for you. please include your first name and use it if you would and decipher text messages only. 202-748-8903. although school through our social media context at booktv is what you really need to remember when it comes to facebook or twitter et cetera. it also make a comment or ask the question on social media and will get to those in just a few minutes. mr. quinones, most of your stories are about and pick you mentioned that mostly young man in mexico are the ones who are working in this area. most of your stores in your book about men. >> guest: right. yes. although i would say that by significant stories about women of course. angie, starla and their daughter

bella is first and foremost that was like the story i begin the book. i think when it comes to drug dealing though and drug trafficking it's basically a man's game. and as is migration honestly. not to say women don't do it but it's oftentimes and every village had been to it's been the men whot have led from mexico. and so those stories are a big part of the topics that i'm writing about. however, the stories of angie, starla and bella were to come like the threat to the least of us all the way through the common thread all the way through, and some of the folks in there, , joel martin is one o

develops a tattoo removal nonprofit. folks like that. i don't think i'm leaving women out of mywo stories. i think that the drug trafficking world, as it stands, is largely a masculine world. and that's reflected i think sometimes in the stories that are right. >> host: sam quinones 2015 book "dreamland" won the national book critics circle award for that year. mr. quinolones, what do you mean by "dreamland"? >> guest: oh,re wow. my question. yes. i mean, "dreamland" refers to a swimming pool in the town, wonderful town portsmouth, ohio, want to say a shadow to all the folks in portsmouth, ohio. wonderful folks down there. it was a swimming pool that

largely galvanized the community of portsmouth for decades. back when smith had a lot of jobs, steel manufacturing, shoe manufacture, all the kind of stuff. they had a lot of jobs and, therefore, could support a thriving main street and a lot of downtown churches and an enormous swimming pool that will begin heart and soul of the town, a place where people came to socialize. really as much as anything, was an enormous public almost the size of a football field. and everybody went there. it was something, i would say all the white people with their, let's put it clearly, a small percentage of black people in portsmouth. they were segregated from that, and even when the poll was integrated they didn't feel quite at home there. but this was a story about this

pool but cannot develop as the town blossomed, in a sense. where you have people come together and p sing one another and losing their virginity, romances for me and all this kind of stuff, just a remarkable place of people coming together. and as the town began to weather, , the jobs left, the manufacturing just went elsewhere. soon the main street was emptying out. half the population leaves, and in 1993, the tail end of all this, the "dreamland" a pool can no longer hasml people enough to make a go of it and they dig it up and it turn into a strip mall. to me this was, i thought, in a remarkable example of what i believe to be at the heart of our addiction epidemic which was our shredding of community all across this country.

it's, it was a place where people came together and when they didn't have, whenit it was dug up and everything they all went indoors. the only place you ever actually saw anybody ever again at all was at walmart now because main street was a shell. and to me this became part of the theme of the book which was to say that the roots of what of the open epidemic addiction at the time really and her own destruction of immunity shredding. we saw youthed sports become clb sports so now it's not about folks come together to watch kids play. it's about training kits to be professionals and getting college scholarship someday. we saw a lot of community banks just sucked up by larger banks. if you go through, across the country use all these ways in which we believe simply the free market with some kindin of god d

whatever then happen with the free market with some destined to be, you know, benevolent and so on. it seemed to me it was a perfect, it was remarkable story, powerful, painful story for that town but it was also almost a metaphor for what we had done to the rest, to the entire country by shredding the things that brought us together. we make ourselves enormously vulnerable. of course as i got into it, the book i was writing, i figured out it would be called "dreamland" about six months before i actually finish the book.. most of the time i did know what the book was going to be called and it just seemed to be that "dreamland" was the perfect title for it. it also fits of course with the great, you do, this is about narcotics and so you can drift off into kind of a dopey dream land when you're on. the traffickers, a mexican gets us talking about they live their

own "dreamland." their treatment was to make a bunch of money selling dope in america. take that money back home and be the boss, , the king, the big gy for whatever six weeks, three months or something like that. be the best for everybody. be the guy who buys beer for everybody. this enormous narcotics in and of itself or can once the money is done you can have much choice. you're not can go back to work in avocados are sugarcane field. you'll go back to work selling dope up in the united states. so everybody has their own dream land and maybe this is also part of the theme. maybe we are all looking for this kind of dream land, easy answers to complicated questions. so what was a complicated question? howqu do we solve a american pa? how do we solve human pain? the easy answer is how about opioid painkillers for everybody? that kind of dream land is will pick what you begin to extrapolate on the idea you begin to see how it fits in this

topic in many ways but, of course, t it starts in the great town of portsmouth, ohio. >> host: let's bring our callers into this conversation as we continue. michael is in miami. you are on with author and journalist sam quinones. >> caller: yes. wow, mr. quinones, solving human pain, you spoke earlier it was discussed dash of such high depths from drugs, suicide and, a million different covid. i'm wondering about your comments on this, if history, if you ever thought about working with a neurobiologists or historian because there's a deeply toxic self interest which i think also discussed in your books, toxic self interest versus group interests because there's a capitalistic in western society survival of the fittest ideology that originally originated to try to justify scientifically racism and white

supremacy in the 1960s with the first libertarians gault and herbert spencer where they're trying to show was, that is how evolution works and think tanks on both sides wrongly thinks it's competition that is the magic behind evolution. it's not. it's actually cooperation and also wrongly you the benefits of evolution because evolution -- >> host: we got a lot to unpack. let's hear from our guest. >> guest: thank thank you. this is verye. interesting idea and one that i am still wrestling with come thinking about, writing about but i do believe that you are right. i try at the beginning of the reagan administration we've seen in london in england at the beginning of the margaret thatcher administration of there. you begin to see this move away from the collective ideal, all government is bad, government is part of the problem, and they

were addressing real issues. government had overstepped in my opinion. there was certain significant overstepping but that does not mean of course the pendulum has to swing all the way to where it did. my feeling is that as time went on we lost sight because we were so prosperous, , certainly in ts country, we're so prosperous that we didn't, felt we didn't actually need one another. we didn't need that collaborative collective community approach to life. everything was done for us because we had every service you could possibly need. we began to believe that we were somehow exceptional. all those rules don't apply to us. i think that's what began to happen, , certainly with the reagan administration and then the pendulum began totr swing ad you begins to see all these towns, a good example is okay, you want free trade. there's arguments for that, but

you have to do something for those towns that have lost those factories that go to mexico, go to malaysia, go to china in colossal numbers. it was almost as if we felt as a country like well, you know, you lose. time for you to suck it up and rebound, you know? it's your bomber, it'ss not our. and i think -- bomber -- that was a prevailing attitude in this country that i think became very damaging and the thing about self-reliance is it dependent on others people. it's counterintuitive i think but you cannot be self-reliant without the help of other people. we lost that i think to a great degree, and i think a symptom, there are others, but a symptom is the enormous very entrenched

now drug addiction epidemic that we are seeing coast to coast. you also see it in other statistics, suicide, depression, friendless news, people don't have any friends, loneliness. you see a lot of things like this. bake housing development being built out in the middle of nowhere so the next i need to go by loaf off bread you to get in your car for for five milese kind of thing. all of these things seem to be baked into american culture in the last 40 years and i think the effect has been to corrode that community feel that we took so for granted, took so for granted here and has enormous benefits to us, and one of those is as a bulwark of defense against things like drugs. when you think about it, we evolve to be community beings. human beings evolved to need,

not to think that to me is a good thing. the absolutely needed. we don't survive as a species without that movement towards each other that is essential. and we got away, in this country, and the last 40 years we believe thatnt well, it didnt apply to us. and so you are seeing a lot of the things that sociologists and mental health expert and on and on, and journalists, are noting about our culture today the mass shooting phenomenon, all that kind of stuff i think because we just kind of shredded all that brought us together and that dream land pool and those job that went away in the main street that had to finally buckle under to walmart, all that is part of that same story. >> host: sam quinones, you brought up walmart which plays a role in your writing. what is that role? >> guest: well, yes.

walmart is first of all a sign that you have no more main street in small-town america. it's a sign thatwn your main street is dead or dying, , or it may have been the reason that your main street is dying. but it's also i think a very important thing that people don't understand about walmart, is it's also the place where you kind of, it's also the lubricant of the drug trade in many towns. i heard this from too many addicts who have convinced me of this.nv and that is the reason for that is that walmart does not put much money at all, certainly comparatively to of the big-boxl stores, much money all into preventing shoplifting. if you go to a target, go to a target, pretty common, go to target, the isles are wide, the lights are bright and use target employees in the red shirts

five, six, eight, every time you visit the place. go to a walmart, the isles are narrow, the lights are dim and you don't see almost, you rarely see a walmart employee, which means that it's extraordinarily easy to rip off walmart. and this is widely known, i want to assure you, remarkably known. every addict who's on the street that i've ever talked to has come up with stories about the ripped off walmart with her boyfriend oral somebody, they ae close to themom ripped off walmart. it was and i think may still be it certainly for all the years were talking about the late '90s into just a couple few years ago, it was ridiculously easy to rip off walmart. and what does that mean? that means all those things that are stolen from walmart are traded for don't. okay? so t-bone steaks, you know, xbox is, perfume, children's shoes,

on and on, dealer and portsmouth i wrote about how dealers would make lists for the addicts. eucharisteo me this and i will give you half the list price in pills. so iff it's an $80 chainsaw, i will give you $40 worth of pills that i'm selling. some people certainly in the town of portsmouth had shops that were made up of stuff, a certain kind of item that they would rip off from walmart. so one woman had an entire departmente full of baby stuff, and a guy had hardware, you know. but what youwh find is it ridiculously easy to rip off walmart, and that is what is stolen feeds the drug dealers. and adds to it, lubricates, that's why i say, lubricates the ripping off a walmart because they're so common common, because in many areas it's almost the only retail option

because it sells everything, food,, xbox and everything between, automotive whatever. it's become a place where people know i can rip off easily and i can take that step to my dealer and my dealer would give me don't for that. it becomes, many walmart this is well-documented as well, because of this becomewa a huge drain on the police department time in whatever town you happen to be. i was talking with folks in paducah, kentucky, and they found that the two walmarts in the town, a town of 15% total officer type in one year because handling shoplifting complaints because walmart has built into its stores almost and ease with which people can rip it off. and all that stuff into -- some woman told you so people are still enough so that enough to eat, a lot of people are stealing for their dope. and i was, i think, too, a lot

of people, a lot of the loss frankly comes from people who work at walmart. they are the ones also ripping people -- not to disparage folks who work there but they were were for a long time not paid enough to care. they don't care too much when they see people walking through the doors with walmart stuff. they will not confront some guy and six well, i will let them go, whatever. but walmart became to me a crucial element in why particularly in that certain areas, appalachia rust belt areas, midwest, why you saw this bit of opioid epidemic so quickly because it was lubricated by all the shoplifting that goes on at walmart, that walmart really has not done enough. may be doing more now certainly but has not done enough to put a lid on.

>> host: sam quinones is joining us from nashville, and rick is calling in from erwin tennessee. go ahead, rick. rick hung up. sorry about that. manny, la joya, california. you were on booktv. >> caller: hi, sam. how areas you? i'm a retired law professor he in la joya, california,, and i used to teach at a deal befoi was a lawyer. i'm about 70. i will be 70 in a few months. i did a few follow-up studies on heroin users, and i did a couple of articles that i just want to cite for you and for folks and get your comment on what do we do now kind of thing. but i have study that a wrote with david musto at yale that's

called a follow-up study of the new haven morphine maintenance clinic of 1920, and it was published in "the new england journal of medicine" april 30, 1981. and soon after that the "new york times" had an editorial on it and called an old way to help addicts, about the morphine maintenance clinics not just the new haven but they were all over the country. this was a way where addicts were not stigmatized. they were allowed to buy their morphine, from actually the pleas in thepo police stations, but this has existed up to the present day in places like vancouver and some places in europe and stuff, i think we have enough to work with.

let's get a response of sam quinones. >> guest: yes, i would say that's an approach that as you say continues to this date. day. in fact, part of it is under the heading of what they call medically-assisted treatment which involves certain medications, occasionally opioids of a lower potency, to calm cravings or blunt overdoses, that kind of thing. it's very, very important i think. it needs to be out of there and needs to be in far wider use it seems to me, because particularly now you have fentanyl out there doing enormous damage. you do have the experiments now beginning in vancouver, new york city with what are called safe consumption sites, meaning you,

the addict, going to displace and use your drug in the presence or nearby a nurse who can then revive you if you then overdose on whatever it is you are using. supposedly, and i think this is what's, going on, i have visited one yet, this is all so a place where you're introduced, nudged perhaps urged to consider drug addiction treatment. i would say that this approach is an interesting one. i don't think we are in a where we should say no to anything. however, i would also say this. there's a saying onsh the street that fentanyl changes everything.in

from my vantage point that could not be more true. fentanyl means that people are dying very, very quickly. there's no long-term user of fentanyl on the street. people die very quickly. heroin, you could last 20, 30, either met people the last 40 years using heroin. notli a great life but they're t bid. that is not happening with fentanyl. so the idea being we will just revive them with this drug called narcan naloxone, known by the brand name narcan, revise your winter having an opioid overdose, , very good, very helpful extraordinarily helps keep people alive. the problem is with this though thatwi it think what may come to pass is you have people who are using. they're going into overdose, and every time you overdose, that is not a neutral event.

you are overdosingrd is, take yu into, the definition of an overdose is when you are deprived of oxygen. your brain shuts down, stops telling your lungs to breathe and you are deprived of oxygen. anytime you do that you're going to risk brain impairment. so every time someone is revive revived, then that person risks brain impairment. you are findingin people getting revived on the streets nowadays have a dozen, a dozen times. sometimes within the same day. it is not uncommon thing. many paramedics have told me this. we have to find a way of making sure that the second part of that safe consumption site, the idea that this is to get people into treatment is really what this is all about. there's an idea, well, a we shod

just meet them where they are. they are not at a moment whether want to get off dope, then okay, we should just say okay. the problem is with that, we know where those people are. they are at death's door. they're using fentanyl. they are going to die. that's not a debatable point back it seems to me. i can imagine anyone who debated honestly? you're going to die on fentanyl the longer you use it. so the idea being, guttate consumption sites just keep using them whenever it strike you as a good idea, we love treatment available for you. those folks are not going to live long enough for that to happen. so again, what may have been a perfectly fine option in the '80s with morphine, with fentanyl it's a very different beast because fentanyl is a very different beast. even when people live and are

revived they still over a a pd of time have this gradual, very perceptible or imperceptible sometimes brain impairment. a a fellow wrote me the other dy said our clients come with an eighth grade reading level, mostly. those are bad six overdoses, the reading level drops to about second grade. those who have had to make overdoses, their drops maybe i'll reading level grade or to come something like that. what i'm saying is this is not harm free, to be constantly revising people. we need to be in the process of pushing people, nudging people, getting people aware that they are not going to live with fentanyl on the street, just won't happen. >> host: throughoutbo your writing you talk about mexican crystall meth, peter t meth, crack, opioids, heroin, fentanyl, pot and the potency of

marijuana today. are these drugs that are happeng today, the so-called designer drugs, a lot more potent and addictive than 20, 30, 40 years ago? >> guest: oh, without a doubt. and, and crucially troubling. it's about supply. this is about how easy it is to come up with this stuff, easy it is to find wherever it is you live. marijuana is a separate issue i think, when it comes to things like meth and fentanyl, which have largely pushed away, crack is like a footnote now honestly. they are so prevalent because, excuse me, because they are synthetic. they can be made with chemicals all yearca round. used to be that in the cartel were in mexico what was most important was control of land.

anybody who's involved in drug production, land is what you need because you can call your marijuana, your opium poppies come all that kind of stuff. under the sun. you don't eat any of that anymore with synthetic drugs. you don't need land, youou don't need sun, rain, farmers, harvesting, you only need a laboratory which is away from the prying eyes of a helicopter. what you need, you don't need land. what you need is shipping ports, and/or two veryy large shipping ports on the western side of mexico which ishi right close to this region that is really drug center for mexico. there's one in a town and another south of that, and these two ports, from these two ports traffic is controlled a lot of the trafficking, a lot of the flow within the sports and they can get access then to all the e world chemicals or any t chemics they want that are made in china

any place else. they get through those ports and almost unlimited quantities. soli that means that they are nt able to make visa drugs in quantities that we are just simply never seen. as the said at the outset of the show, i said they have covered the entire country from l.a. skidrow, you got those drugs ever, fentanyl and meth and assorted because they control the chemical flow in, those ports, otherwise his will but certainly those two ports are printable and all this. those ports of where these chemicals come in. you can therefore make just simply staggering quantities of these drugs, and enough again to do the unprecedented thing of cover the country both of them. and at the same time, we don't have much hissed with fentanyl but we do have luggage with

amphetamine and the price of methamphetamine as a cover the entire country of meth has dropped by 70, 80%. in nashville and was $19,000 a pound a pound. now it's something in the order of $3000 a pound. it's a remarkable remarkable thing and very r scary, too, because it's everywhere. that's the problem. and to me i once when i lived in mexico i never really wrote much about the drug worked when i lived in mexico. i was a freelancer and i prefer to let other reporters who were deeply, , who are part of some g media corporation, people backing them up, , i'm a freelancer, and independent, a loner, i don't up so i bulk of it. i, didn't. immigration was a more important topic at the time. but if you ask me about drugs and drug trafficking, i set a premature much agree with the typical tactic and i did all drugs begin with demand and supply false demand. and i would say that the last

12, 13 years writing these books on this topic of totally changed my opinion on that. i believe now that supply is paramount, and supply certainly is they reason, you know, suppy is the story would you talk about the opiate epidemic. we didn't have this enormous population of addicted opioid consumer or before the opioid expansion of the opioid painkiller in all manner of paint pain and all that kind ofle stuff, provided by, promoted by phrma companies and prescribed by doctors. just a catastrophic supply of the stuff and now you see mexican underworld taking over from that ander saying now we're going to come we'll just supply, basically the entire almost entire united states with the stuff. it's all aboutuf supply. you can't get away from it. it affects everything. fix him he could get addicted, how may peoplele die how to tret it, law enforcement, and it on like that.

to me that is an idea that occurred to me after i left mexico and as is writing about these topics. >> host: sam quinones in both "dreamland" and "the least of us" looks at the business organization of how drugs are right in the united states, have their distributed, et cetera. chris is in indio california. please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: any country that spends more money on drug sniffing dogs, addiction research has actually come up with what may be the silver bullet. it came out in october 21 addition of pharmaceuticals university of california irvine, research ancient chinese herb and it was found to inhibit tolerance, which means that it can be used to update addiction.

did you about that, that's my question? >> guest: i'm afraid i've not heard about it but it easy to find online if you want to send me a link to that study. i'm very interested in this kind of stuff so i apologize for not having heard about that specific study, but feelab free to look e up if you don't mind and should be a link to it if you don't mind. >> host: louisiana, please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: hey, sam, i'm just curious because i been listening to stuff and you were talking about how america essentially has changed. i was a big ross perot patriot and stuff, and he said that would be a giant sucking sound because both the democrats and republicans wanted to connect canada/u.s. and mexico. so do you think this was a downfall of america? thank you, sam.

>> guest: thanks of the question. the great one, and you could spend books discussing it, and it's a very valid question i think. i would say that free trade, you know, like everything in life, is about trade-offs. it's about trade-offs. it's just how you respond to this trade-offs that i think is crucial. so we lost many jobs because of that. we also gained many jobs because of that i think we have a lot of people working in different industries now that never would of been therere before. you have communities that did very well, particularly in the west, certain part of the atlantic coast as well i would say, various places you can find these, austin, texas, et cetera, places like that. you also find places that were hammered, which is hammeredha by this. and the problem that i think

took place was that we didn't see it as important to deal with that. my feeling was, i think this is largely true, that the jobs the left to mexico might well have left elsewhere as well. i don't think, however, we ever did enough to make sure, to see will be could you as a culture, as a country to prevent those jetsam leaving in the middle of free trade. i just don't see that we were, you know, we were taken by this kind of free market religion, what you think it kind of amounted to. and, therefore, anything that happens with this is going to be okay. there isha no doubt as you travl to places like ohio, kentucky, indiana, et cetera, various places like that you can see the remnants of what was pre-nafta,

free free trade, perhaps pre-globalization, all of that. how toit then deal with that, hw to find a solution in which other parts of the country can benefit but these parts of the country really get are far more stuff attention to we never made that step. we never did what we, i testified in one of the more surreal moments in my life, i testified before the u.s. senate. friends ofre mine will think how what earth did this guy ever testified before the u.s. senate? but i i did come thanks to lamak alexander and his h.e.l.p. committee there in the senate a couple years back. in which i said i think it's appropriate to think in terms of a marshall plan for those parts of the country that have not been able to rebound the way we thought they would or they could from what they lost due to this kind of deindustrialization, free trade and what have you.

.. well. we all pay the price. it is about this idea, that is not concern me, i'm over here in the silicon valley, that is in west virginia, that is not matter to me. no, it >> it absolute does. we cannot -- we are our brother's keeper and we cannot say, well, that's somebody else's problem. no, it's our problem. >> text message for you mr. quinones, you blythely referred to hidden costs, drug trafficking, trafficking, et cetera, what will that have to do with the proposed illegal aliens in our country? >> that's part of the mix and i

was thinking frankly of schools and education, these are again, illegal immigration has been an enormously, i would say, frankly, a vibrant injection of vibrancy in our economy. i don't think it's a good idea that people here illegally are easily exploited. they are here providing unfair competition to american workers. i think frequently, but i think they're there because there is, again, we believe in the free market, right? the free market is saying, we value these workers. they do essential work for us. there's always these other issues that the texter, i guess, brings up which with are huge and which affect american lives very clearly. it depends what i think frequently what it depends on is the absolute position that

one holds in the economy. if you're in the middle or upper middle classes, you see immigration one way, if you're towards the narrow-- the lower end, the bottom end, you're going to see it differently. i was in west side san bernardino years ago and it's largely mexican-american inhabited by people who came over from mexico in 1920's and now it's their children or great-grandchildren, really, who are there and that's one of the staunchest anti-immigration areas i've been in because of two mothers who spent hours telling me their perspective. these mexican guys are invading, these were mexican-american families, they're invading and shouldn't be here. they're stealing the jobs, the words they're using.

in the car washes, restaurants, primarily those jobs and there was a deep, deep resentment. we're americans, we speak english, we don't speak spanish much anymore, there was this definite feeling, we are not these folks. even though we have similar last names and we may go to the same catholic church, what have you, we are definitely different, from which point of view, which point in the economy you view immigration, color is everything. people in african-american community, in years ago when this issue was hotter than i think it really is today, were extraordinarily articular, lets assay, on this very issue, that folks were coming here, they were unfair competition, they were living five, six guys to an apartment, we can't afford to do that. we have mortgages, we have rent, we have all of this stuff and they're taking jobs that we can't compete with at wages or

at, you know, for hours and hours a day that we can't do. so, all of that is part of this very, very complicated mix. what to do about it, oh, my god, i don't know. to me though, everything that has to happen, has to happen bi-nationally, there can't be one country is doing everything, and the other country is doing nothing. and it's not about what mexico can do and the united states can do. same with drugs. >> and robert, you're on book tv with author sam quinones. >> thank you for taking my call. your assessment of the hollowing out of america due to

reaganomics. >> and to you look at the who will -- hollowing out of the industrial and the racism that reagan used and catalyst, particularly white people to vote against their best interests? >> my books are very narrowly focused on the drug issue so that doesn't come up. nor really does reaganomics per se although i clearly see the connection. and also, the treatment of the free market is almost like when quasi religious ways, almost god's will, that kind of thing. i study economics in the 1970's and 80's and found it to be very rigid discipline where you either, it's everything was a

religion, marxism was a religion and didn't take into account anything human almost, a period thing and i kind of regret having studied it back then. a far more interesting topic to study today than in 1981, '82, i would, however, say that there is a lot to what you're talking about. there's a remarkable ability for -- of political marketers, seems to me, to push buttons that they very keenly understand will move people to do certain things, even if it doesn't make sense that they're doing it because they're benefitting very wealthy people when these folks are working class and this kind of thing and it has-- and you can see it still, i would say, even more pronounced way today.

you can name several issues that would be put-- kind of push button issues, abortion, guns, homosexuality and critical race theory and some other stuff, you know, and just push those and people will refund. it doesn't matter what you actually mean by that or what the people who agree with you, with their policies are on that. it's just-- it's a way of pushing people's outrage and the neuroscience of outrage is a fascinating thing. we all evolve to have outrage because it's what policed communities early on, it was a way of saying, calling people out. you can't do this because, your behavior is hurting our community. but in order to do that, you know, you had to step out into the public. you had to publicly accuse somebody, you know, there had to be this kind of cost that

you had to bear. i think outrage is now not born by the people who feel it, they just feel it and it feels good and particularly see this on all, the entire political spectrum of cable tv news. these people are bad, you're right, they're bad, you're right. and so it gets into complicated topics, if you're asking. it's a really interesting thing. it originates, i believe, in that time frame you're referring to and i would say now it's taken to a whole new level, almost. it seems to me, where people are just being prodded and pushed. social media and cable tv news and i'm referring to fox news and cnn both, this is not journalism. this is like media personalities just prodding us

with outrage and outrage and become like the mice in the cage hit the cocaine water over and over and over because it alarms our brains and we can't get enough of it. i have turned-- we don't have cable tv news at all in our family and we turned off cable tv in our family because we couldn't stand it anymore. and i do believe that this is part of what-- where we are now, this prodding to outrage and what that does is frequently makes people vote or support ideas that are kind of contrary to best interests at some times. >> i would simply say that c-span is founded and funded by the cable industry, and we appreciate that very much. >> okay. >> rick, you're on with sam

quinones. rick, are you with us? we've given rick two times and i think that's enough. this is a text messages, mr. quinones, from pennsylvania. since fentanyl is used medically, at what point is it illegal, how is it packaged and how is it caught? >> well, it's illegal first and foremost it's made illicitly not made in a pharmaceutical factors with inspectors and following f.d.a. guidelines. et cetera et cetera. it's the ways that the pharmaceutical industries abide by and don't make it that wayment and it's imagined, you name it and that's one of the stories of today. the amount of supply they've been able to produce down in mexico has forced them to do innovate in terms of how it's packaged. so now what you're finding the last few years, you're finding

counterfeit pills coming over and by the tens of millions i dare say now, starts out in the thousands and now it's up to, i think, pretty clearly tens of millions. where you're finding pills, counterfeit pills that look like perk sets or xanax, or blue pills, they press them and make them look almost exactly like the real thing except for the pills now have nothing, but fentanyl. they make so much fentanyl they're looking for way providing an administration vehicle and these administration vehicles or these little pills that look exactly like the legitimate versions in-- that you see in pharmacies. and so, it's coming across like that. it's coming across by the kilo pack. most of this stuff is coming

through, again, border crossings, through very, very heavily monitored border crossings, but we simply don't have the staff, i don't think. i think this is clear, to search more than a small percentage of all the trucks that come across the border in a single day, it's just huge numbers of trucks because there's free trade, right? so-- >> steve in lincoln, nebraska follows up on peggy's. it seems that the mexican government are complicit to the mexican cartels. are there any conceivable scenarios where this government complicity and corruption would change? >> i would say that that is true when you saw the mexican government are complicit. the mexican government as a

total i'm not sure. but enough to make this a major, major problem, okay? i believe that having lived in mexican for 10 years and don't view mexico with rose colored glasses, i love mexico, great many years there and clearly aware of issues that the country has with regard to corruption that the texter mentions. i would say that we need a sustained collaborative corrective kind of approach between both countries because both countries bring something to this very wobbly table, okay? one that the mexican side is this criminal justice system that's not only corrupt, it's been underfunded, corroded and it does not have the same stability and morale and

training that we see in the united states, it's extraordinary important and you can see the difference if you just go to el paso juarez. places i've been to more than that. el paso has 15 to 20 i think homicides a year and don't know the last figures, but it's already there. juarez 3,000, 5,000-- 3,000, many, many more, even though 200 yards across the river from each other. you can see the grave difference of grave disparities in what they have in mexico they've invested in local government, very, very important. we enjoy a remarkably resilient and flexible and innovative local government, where in mexico, i can tell you i've golfed covered this many times in mexico, it's backward even though a long way since i was

there, it's still far, far to go, i think. at the same time, it's important to understand why that impunity and that corruption, one of the reasons that exists is because they have armed themselves with guns that were bought legally and easily in this country primarily assault weapons, which become the weapon of choose for the mexican drug cartels. bought easily and cheaply here in the united states and smuggled south to mexico. those wars are being fought with guns that are-- the statistics, 60 to 70% purchased in the united states. the assault weapons that we have been talking about lately because of the mass shootings because they're now legal, you can buy them anywhere, very cheap, very easy, they have been the main fuel down there in mexico's drug wars for a

long time right now. so, we need to do something about the guns that is fueling that impunity that allows for massive supplies of meth. massive supplies in fentanyl to be produced down in mexico and then funneled up here to the united states. again, it's all about supply. it's about supply of guns. it's about supplies of dope and there's an symbiotic. >> two popular as far as, ozark and queen of the south, deal with mexican drug cartels and here and in the united states. >> and i watched ozark and they killed off the characters i like. oh, jimmy's dead, not going to watch that anymore. >> was there reality in what

we're seeing there? >> i would say that the reality, when you begin to see torture and very public murder in the united states, that that does not correspond to reality because for a very good reason, and what i was just talking about. the mexican drug trafficking world, you in, which is cartels and a bunch of small time operators and family networks and village-based networks and so on. all selling drugs and some of them very organized and some less so, but they're all very, very clear that you don't commit these kinds of heinous crimes down in mexico that you're doing down in mexico up in the united states because you will go to prison. there is still a rule of law when it manies could that and i think that's extraordinarily

important, it's a rule of law is a precious, precious thing and when you lose it, you lose so much and i saw this when i lived in mexico where the rule of law was a ten uous thing was a big thing, and i would say you've got depiction of people in the united states committing horrible and torture, i'm not saying it never happens, but there's good business reasons why that really is not the norm. it just doesn't happen. you have, in fact, on the contrary, in certain areas i've been reporting in in the past, and where you have different cartel groups and trafficking organizations that may be at each other's throats down in mexico are co-existing and even sometimes collaborating up in say, colorado or other parts of the country because it's about a business.

this is not -- this is about business, about making money and everyone is clear on that and that's why you don't go committing these especially heinous crime. not that nobody's ever murdered behind this stuff, but the kind of stuff in mexico that they've gotten used to. piles of bodies, people hanging from the overpass, beheadings. >> i went to mexico, and traveled by bus, and went up to the border, tijuana, et cetera, no problem ever, but one time. and now, it's very difficult, but a lot of that is because they have easy, easy access to the weapons that are being-- that you now on the news with mass shootings and people can buy them here and smuggle them

south. >> and derrick from albuquerque, by the way. >> great town. >> yeah, i was going to ask if you've ever been through here. >> many times. >> but this subject is real close to me i'll wrap up as quick as possible. i'm a recovering addict and recovered in 2012 through medicated assisted treatment, but the fentanyl problem and meth problem in albuquerque has taken over the city, and my uncle died of over dose of fentanyl. and tied how you say the drugs come here and the guns and money goes there and they have the mass problem and see if you have-- if you think there's any solution to this besides massive rehabs and you know, people are just dying everyday at massive numbers.

>> before we get an answer from mr. quinones, you were sober in 2012, what was your drug, what were you using. >> i started off using pills the blue m-30 pills he was talking about as the descriptions and the medication clinics making it to get harder and changed over to heroin and i had to get medicated assisted treatment and using methadone to get off the heroin. >> congratulations, good for you, keep going. very impressive achievement, believe me, i know how hard it is, it can be, so you keep going, all right. feel free to get in touch with me on e-mail and i'd love to talk with you on this later. i think what you probably know to be true if you had been using now you might not well have survived because it's fentanyl in everything.

fentanyl. fentanyl changes everything and everybody dies. if you're on the street, you're going to die. the only option is you must get off the street, get treatment. we have to provide that for people, it seems to me and i would say you're absolutely right. and you live in albuquerque and both of my first two books were by the press and been there a number of times in new mexico. and the dope that comes in is paid for and the money goes south along with the guns. it's very important for americans to understand how many of the guns that we buy and sell and so easy to do and all, anybody can do it how many of the guns are ensuring, ensuring down in mexico that they can produce these

catastrophic amount of dope, drugs. fentanyl and methamphetamine. and it's between the two countries. you cannot produce this kind of dope without vast weaponry that is unceasing. it keeps on coming and that's what they get. and the assault rifles, you know, the cartel wars that we're experiencing now, and for the last good number of years, really began to escalate the year after in the united states we allowed the assault weapon ban to expire. okay? and now, that may be a coincidence, i don't know. but what i can say, as i said before, that the guns that are being purchased here and smuggled south are making it certain that those guys can use their corruption, can use a variety of other tools at their

disposal to produce enough methamphetamine so that the price drops from 19,000 to 3,000 a pound in the city of nashville. that's the price of those guns going south. that's fentanyl that's killing everybody, that's the price of easy to buy guns, particularly assault weapons going south. assault weapons are a prize because it's a war, these are guys mostly with each other, mostly with the military. keep this this in mind. >> something you write about, mr. quinones, this is written to you, what if drugs were legalized and perhaps treated as alcohol. >> that's a question. a few things to say and i've gone back and forth on this topic many a time and it's always worth bringing up and

batting around, i think, because it's important. clearly illegal drugs fuel mafias. we saw that with prohibition, you know. clearly, too, legal drugs result in far more use than those drugs when they were illegal. very clear, okay? so you can see that with alcohol, i think, you can see it with a lot of different things, you know. and when you make stuff legal and go from there, then it becomes easier and more socially acceptable to do it. and therefore, you have to plan for the inevitable after effects or side effects from that increased use and that can, you know, we will always need jail because jail is-- what is the drug that lands

most people in jail? it's alcohol, it's alcohol. so we'll always need jails because of that. we'll always need some way of dealing with the after effects, or the side effects of legalization. i would like to see, i guess, personally, let me say. i would like to see us legalize one drug well, and right now we're mangling the job with marijuana in my opinion. >> what's one of the great lessons of the opioid epidemic, right? i believe this is one. be careful, be careful what very potent drug you make legal and widely available with outlannish claims about risk-free nature. and you say maybe we should

make all of those legal. opioids start with legal drugs. it's doctors and pharmaceutical companies promoting the hell out of this. and this is another topic i wrote in "the least of us", that is to say, i'm not sure -- i don't believe in fact that we have the kind of culture in america that will tolerate, have much appetite for the kind of government regulation that would be required to successfully legalize a drug in america. other countries may be able to do it. i don't know that we are there as a culture. i think we have too much -- we bridle too much against government intrusion and look we're in the middle of climate

change, an existential threat to this planet and in california we've made it literally legal to have marijuana grown indoors. and it can grow outdoors. and a carbon footprint. my feeling is that we don't have in this country the appetite for the kind of serious regulation that would be necessary to legalize drugs successfully. marijuana is a disaster, it seems to me. it loses track of all the lessons we should have learned in prohibition. and prohibition, we didn't-- after prohibition was over, we didn't legalize all of this bathtub hooch and the stuff

that made people blind. the pot world is filled with versions of marijuana, 30, 40% thc. vapes that are 90% thc, the active ingredient in marijuana. seems to me that we need to step back, go very slowly, very cautiously, take our time and be aware that we're really, really bad at this and don't know what we're doing. instead opening up the doors. to me it feels right now in some states, anyway, it feels very much like-- or maybe just generally in america, it feels very much like alcohol pre prohibition, anything goes, it's fine. 90% vapes. fine. feels like before we start legalizing heroin and methamphetamine how about we do marijuana cautiously, humbly,

slowly, really slowly, do it right and instead of rushing in. great book called "blitz", the one country that literally legalized methamphetamines. this book is about that country. it's about the third reich and nazi germany. he had legalized methamphetamines. it seems to me that there's lessons about socieal control on this. >> and when i view it from the perspective of i've been doing it in the last few years, it gets me -- and people say shouldn't we legalize drugs because of the opioid epidemic, we should legalize drugs, i don't know. >> all four about sam quinones'

drugs are about people. and i want to read a few selected sentences to kind of add to what he just said. business combines are now everywhere. we call them big pharma, big tech, big oil. now emerging is big dope. i don't trust american capitalism to do drug legalization responsibly and he goes on to write that decriminalizing drugs also removes the one lever we have to push men and women towards sobriety. waiting around for them to decide to offer treatment is the opposite of compassion when the drugs on the street are as cheap, prevalent and deadly as they are today. this is a text message, mr. quinones, hi, sam, i'm 73 years old and have to use opioid descriptions for pain management to control osteoarthritis which can be

disabling. because of abuse i had to sign a contract with my general practitioner that he's the only describing and any other doctor can be involved. i take the prescribed amount and no more. the insurance company monitors my prescriptions. people who need them are going to strict rules and why aren't the abusers monitored, too? >> i would say, yes, i would say that we've changed a lot. i remember writing "dreamland" when i was writing "dreamland", that wasn't true. you could get refills for anything and pushed on you. i remember i had my appendix out a year or so before i was involved in this, they give me two vicodin a day in hospital and cut me loose a third day and gave me an enormous 60 vicodin, say, take as needed and i had no idea what it was.

and i didn't know what vicodin was at that point. and i don't like taking pills. and i took two and the 58 remained in the back of my medicine cabinet. i think the strict regulation of those pills is a good thing. i do, however, we need to understand there are people like the gentleman who wrote to you who are clearly nonabusers, clearly these drugs are a benefit to their lives, and this is the case all across the country, to many people like that, and so, cracking down on them to the degree-- sounds like he's able to get his medication and it's a very good thing and i'm happy he is, but oftentimes people cannot get their medication because of this abuse, because, you know, the pendulum was here and now it swung back more towards over

here now and i think that that is really something na also needs to change. we need to modify that, we need to take into account the person and this has always been the story. before, you know, before the opioid epidemic, very rarely did anybody get these pills and pain meds in hospital, you had to have doctors sign three, three different doctors sign off on the use and no one was getting the refills and taking any of the drugs home, that kind of stuff and then you have this period of just freeing up entirely of the prescribing practices and so on and then everybody's got to refill and everybody-- and tell i've got a pain here and it gives you another refill, that kind of thing, and seems to me that we treat everybody the same. it's like, all or nothing. you know? and let's just say, nothing or all. and it feels like we need to

think more deeply about this and also, provide within our medical structure time with doctors, patients who are suffering from chronic pain they need a wide variety of treatment, you know, they can't be just one thing, but when that one thing works pretty well, they can't then be told no, you're a drug abuser or this-- you can become addicted, this person is clearly, this person is able to handle it. i don't think that we have this happy medium which is where we ought to be and i'm not quite sure the reasons why not, but honestly, it doesn't seem to me that folks like your caller there, would actually -- were taken enough into account and certainly, some who have lost their access to these pills really, i think, need to be -- that needs to, that these

issues need to be addressed. and i'm not sure they are. >> mike is calling in for sam bernardino, california, please go ahead, mike. >> thank you. mr. quinones. >> yeah. >> my question is on fentanyl. i know there's a lot of money being made sales, but do you think there's a more sinister motive for introducing it to our country and also, how widespread is it? is it worldwide in other countries? >> mike, do you think there's a more sinister motive? >> well, it did come from china. >> i would say that i have not done reporting on the question you're asking, mike, but it's absolutely a valid one, and absolutely a valid one and i may try to do some reporting on

that if i can, maybe after the paper back version comes out in november because i think it's an important issue. i do believe from anecdotally, from speaking with people on the border that there are signs up. the cartel world in mexico that say we make fentanyl for the gringos and anybody selling fentanyl to mexicans will be killed, that kind of thing, not sure how widespread that is either. but you have to kind of view it, fentanyl and of course, carfentanyl 100 times worse, as almost as weapons of mass destruction now. and i frequently view what we're going through now, not -- it's a drug problem. it's a drug issue. and preying on people who are already drug addicted, but it feels as much to me like a poisoning than simply a drug

issue when the drugs were far more accommodating, for giving, let's say, speaking of heroin, even heroin, amazing to speak about heroin like this, but i think it was, heroin was more for giving. you could give 40 years on heroin and you can't on fentanyl, illicit fentanyl. and i haven't reported on this. i have inklings that some of what you say may be true. and china has cut back on fentanyl and only a few companies now. and haven't cut down on the precursors are companies in china are allowed to make and that's where the traffickers get the chemicals to make fentanyl is china. it's a good question and i'll -- may try to get back at that

topic once some of the hubbub dies down regarding my latest book. >> overdose deaths hit records last year, this is a recent headline in the wall street journal and many other papers, over 100,000 people died of over dose deaths last year, and as mr. quinones writes, more people died of overdose than died in the vietnam war, go ahead, please. >> thank you, c-span. thank you, sam. just wanted to cover and ask an opinion. under the of the usa, we're the only government, country, of assimilation for the rule of law, liberty and pursuit of happiness. given that, your opinion, given your decade of exposure to mexico-usa cultures, can a

movement of merging america and mexico occur with five point using illicit drugs as motivational enemy, 30 years mexico joins usa, two tier wages, gnp, largest country to avoid triads and mafia. >> phil, what made you think about this? >> because we are so entwined already and both are corrupt to either one extent or the other, that we could join forces, and work together to become one and we would be bigger than china or russia. >> that's phil in portland, oregon. mr. quinones, anything you want to address. >> i'm not sure i have an opinion on that. sometimes when you're a

reporter, you say i don't know. >> alan, texting to you, do you see a resolution to the war on drugs, particularly in mexico? if so, how long until it's over? >> you know, it's got a lot of roots and it's got a lot of -- and, but i do believe that the mexican government needs to do, step up and do a whole lot more than it has been doing recently and for most of its history been doing. i mean, really, it's not much of a partner. that's not a say that we don't have our issues as i've spoken at great length about those, the weapons bought here and smuggled south into mexico already on this show, but i have to say that the country that really needs to address this problem most deeply is mexico, it seems to me, because

it gets to bigger issues of a kind of gross economic unequality, unfairness, it gets to issues of investing in infrastructure, local governments, all of that kind of stuff is all of this story. and you can clearly see it if you know mexico well. and it gets down to the point, too, that we need to deal with sometimes just the most basic stuff. i think the traffickers, it's my impression, my feeling, hunch, gut instinct, let's say, that the trafficking world has actually-- making huge amounts of profits, seemingly impenetratable has actually painted itself in a difficult corner. first of all, there's no drug in the united states that's now safe to use. no street drug that's now safe to use.

every line of cocaine is likely to have fentanyl and meth, marijuana now, you're finding it as well. the heroin, that's called heroin doesn't have heroin it's mostly fentanyl. and what's more, so you're kinding an enfire situation where it's really-- there's no -- you cannot exaggerate the dangers of the drugs on the street anymore. they're all deadly. it's russian roulette every single time. that's one thing. and the other thing they prospered because they had for so many years all of these different places they could make their drugs, and grow their drugs, essentially marijuana, heroin, poppies, et cetera. now they have funneled all of their production, narrowed their production capability through a few ports. so if you do something about those ports, and all of those chemicals coming in that are clearly designed to make

methamphetamine, the quantities they're coming in or clearly designed to make fentanyl. it would not be that hard for the mexican government to deeply dig into what's coming through those ports because there's only a few of them. maybe a dozen that are really part of the issue. would they go elsewhere? of course they would. they're not able to get the stuff easily into the united states as they are as going north a few hundred miles and going through those borders. it seems to me that they have painted themselves into a very sticky place that we need-- we ought to take advantage of. first of all, in our schools, there's nothing exaggerated. you cannot exaggerate the dangers of the drugs and you need to talk to the kids and they can see it anyway. some type of collaboration on

the united states and mexico on these issues although the current government of mexico does not seem interested in this at all, nevertheless, a collaboration on the issues of dealing with the chemicals coming through these ports, would do enormous amounts. would it be 100% solution? it would not. we don't need 100% solution, we need 20%, 50%, 30% solutions. that's the way forward to seems to me. >> there's a much website, judge for yourselves.info and it's on the screen. one sense from "the washington post" editorial page. how did the opioid epidemic overtake america? the prevailing narrative offered a too easy scapegoat, if not purdue, who drove the epidemic. mr. quinones, oxycontin was

only 4% of the-- >> that's true, it's not only one villain in this story, and which is what the tale i tell in dreamland. it's not one family only. certainly one family and purdue pharma and sackler family bear a responsibility for what went on. there are a lot of rats to this story-- there are a lot of rates to this story. what they want a lot of times, the unwillingness to get in shape and stop smoking and drinking and on and on and on. doctors would tell us we don't need the pills, do this, this and this. responsibility for wellness, we as a culture push back on that and there's a lot of corporate economic interest that you see in the drug companies, every

company that makes these pills was part of this mix. johnson & johnson was, too. so was numerous of these companies. i would say this about oxycontin, so it's role is outsized because, first of all, that's a tiny company. that's a tiny company. their importance to this story is they were part of this massive push to-- in pharmaceutical sales in the mid 90's and 2000's. every company was part of this. hiring huge numbers of salesmen and go out there and badger doctors until they buy your stuff, but the only company whose drug was solely a narcotic which they promoted entirely as risk-free almost like an over-the-counter med inis. oxycontin's role in what happened was that it took people, because it had no other

abuse deterrent in it, it took people up to very high doses, daily doses so you would go from 150 milligrams to 200, 300 milligrams daily of this stuff in an attempt to control your pain and every time your tolerance leveled out you'd have to take more and this kind of thing, and then frequently what happened. people would lose their insurance, doctor would cut them off and then those folks would have no choice, but to switch to-- going into treatment was hard to find at the time or switch to heroin and you saw this-- oxycontin building up the tolerance to our addictive population to this country to the point where nothing else would do except for heroin. they went to the streets, they tried to buy oxycontin on the streets, it was a dollar a

milligram. can't afford that a day, so switch to heroin. oxycontin created the tolerance levels nationwide that the other opioids would never be able to recreate to that extent and when they do that, they end up creating heroin addicts in waiting. and so it's true that some small percentage maybe of all the pills that were prescribed were oxycontin, but the role was outsized because they took them to high tolerance and frequently those folks couldn't afford it, they lose their insurance and a lot of reasons why this happens and eventually on the streets and switch to heroin and i would also say that it's clear to me that the

sackler family and purdue pharma, inknow -- innovated, let's say an addictive narcotic. that's what they're doing. they're not selling antihistamine, their salesmen were paid the biggest bonuses in the industry. there's an out-size role for the purdue pharma, sackler family in this story. it's true, there's not one person, thing, or family eastern, i think i say this in the book as well. there's not just one root to this. it's rooted in the american commercial. >> let's try to get brad from international falls, minnesota in here. go ahead, brad. >> boy, this is had a great conversation, i've been enjoying listening to it, but

you were talking earlier about the guns going into mexico and we talk about collaborating with the mexican government, you know, you look at some of the things that our government has tried doing with the mexican involvement and that-- the first one we started well, i mean, there's been lots, but the one i'm going to speak about wide receiver to having, understanding the guns and where the guns were going into the, you know, the bad areas of mexico. >> yeah. >> hey, brad, we've kind of covered that area and we're running short on time and i apologize to you. you're up there on the border with canada. are you seeing any similarities up there, any drug flow, et cetera? >> well, here is the thing my father started under operation wet back 1955, so i understand as much or more than most people about how the

trafficking or whether it be, you know, it's not so much the goods and services, but my father was on the immigration side inspb on the people side. >> brad, i apologize that we're running short on time. one of the things we didn't get to and we want to make sure to get to this. we ask our authors what their favorite books are and what they're reading. here are sam quinones responses, favorite books, killings, the corpse had a familiar face, edna buchanan, biography of power, never let me go, smiley's people currently reading frederick douglas. the reformmation of history, and king james bible and i do

need to bring up the last one. mr. quinones, you write that you're not a christian, but so many of the stories that you tell and the people have been helped by christians and churches and people who are following the book of matthew, et cetera. >> right. i would say that this book was hard to write because i didn't have a map, a road map, which i have for dreamland, i wrote out a big book proposal. for this one, i didn't have that and so what i began to do is read fairly widely and i had read the gospels before, even though i say, i'm not a christian. i do find the bible to be an important, absolutely, an essential book and so, i was reading it and just read the gospel of matthew at a time when i was also thinking about these topics of what does this addiction epidemic mean?

what does the shredding of community mean? well, it means that we've turned our book on the least among us, the least of our brethren as jesus would say, and it seems like the bulwark or the way forward is focusing in the most local way on trying to make your communities easier to live in and easier to-- it's just more vulnerable people. and to me, that's really-- so we've been talking mostly on this show about fentanyl and methamphetamine. and rightly so. it's a paramount issue and it's around the country and it would have been for the last five years. but the book that i ended up putting together was really the heart and soul of that book, i believe, i feel, is the stories of americans in the smallest,

least sexy way, working to repair community. that was my focus, really, and then the drug story kind of evolved as i was doing that. i felt that this was crucial because it showed us, we had turned our back on this most potent and powerful idea that we need community and that that is the way we deal best with our problems that we face together as a country, and that telling stories of americans who are involved in, again, the smallest little ways, trying to repair that, was actually a radical thing, what they're doing is actually radical, telling their stories was a radical, almost revolutionary thing in a time where it's every man for himself and it doesn't matter if we look after each other or not. and i think that jesus clearly showed that he was dd --

he knew the importance of community, he understood that we could not live without it and we had tried in this country for the last 40 years, seems to me and i think that the symptoms of that are, again, friendlessness, loneliness, depression, suicide, and most importantly, from my perspective, the addition epidemic the last 25 years or so. >> sam quinones' first two books, two sales from another mexico followed by antonio's gun and delphino's dream and unfortunately, we didn't get to them as much as we should have. the next two books, dreamland, america's opiate epidemic, and the least of us. then true sales, america in the time of fentanyl and meth. mr. quinones, we appreciate you

joining us on book tv. >> and appreciate it, thank you to c-span, i love you guys. ♪♪ >> weekends on c-span2, documenting america's stories and bringing you the latest in nop fiction books and authors and funding from c-span2 comes from these television companies and more, including buckeye broadband. ♪♪ >> buckeye broadband, along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. ♪♪ >> listening to programs on c-span through c-span radio just got easier. tell your smart speaker to